I don't know. It seems like Gore Vidal would cost extra, somehow. Maybe there's an internal budget, like in RollerCoaster Tycoon. If you hire Gore as narrator, you can't afford Ry Cooder as music director.

And if you click on David Hartman, the program shuts down. A joke, a joke! A Ken Burns program would never be so mean-spiritedly judgmental. The whole point of Ken Burns, I'm pretty sure, is a kind of democracy of esteem, in which Benny Goodman is Jim Thorpe is Thomas Jefferson is Billie Holiday is Mark Twain is Jackie Robinson is William Tecumseh Sherman. (Wait a minute. That could be a whole separate software product. Some kind of game in which Miles Davis negotiates the Louisiana Purchase, in which Stan Musial leads a desperate charge at Gettysburg.)

You could photo-shop in a few pictures of yourself, but mainly the documentary would linger lovingly over a series of etchings, lithographs, ferrotypes, lantern slides, rotogravures, woodcuts, all of them having nothing to do with you except insofar as you, and they, are Americana.

You would type personalized information to be dubbed into stock interviews.

So there would be Doris Kearns Goodwin saying, "But it isn't until 1991 when he TRADES IN THE ACCORD and then LEASES A MERCEDES SL-500 that he STOPS FEELING LIKE A LOSER." [Disturbing oom-pah tuba and French horn version of "We Are the Champions."]

(One of the current television-induced affectations among historians is this business of talking, always, in the present tense, as if history were a feverish dream they were recounting to a psychoanalyst: "So in 434, Attila murders his brother and then tells the Pope he's going to stick a scimitar in...")

Even if you feel truly embraced by black Americans, there is something bittersweetly enticing about having Cornel West judge you unfairly.

Don't get me wrong. I like Ken Burns and his documentaries, and, believe me, I know what else is on television. On Monday night, Burns' "Mark Twain" went up against "Becker" and a made-for-TV movie based on a book about the original "Monday Night Football" broadcasting team (Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and William Dean Howells, for those who have forgotten).

People like Burns' stuff because it's oddly comforting, even as it purports to grapple with discomfiting themes, especially race in America. Have a glass of wine. Watch the engravings. Plunk plink plink, say the guitars and banjos. You can doze a little here and there and still claim, the next day, to have been culturally improved -- more so than the people who watched "JAG," anyway.

Truth? The Twain thing is a little boring, even if you like and care about Twain. If you're a person who feels obliged to watch, you get a little restless after an hour or so. You start wondering how Jon Bon Jovi is doing over on Ally McBeal and resenting the people who feel entitled to watch any garbage they feel like watching.

Part of the problem is that Burns is so unwilling to throw any inside heat, stick a fastball in somebody's ear. (We think of Gene Hackman as Royal Tenenbaum, proposing to teach his grandchildren about fun. "You know!: The brick through the other guy's windshield!")

Inside heat, in this instance, might have included a Twain-hater like John Wallace who once, on "Nightline," branded "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" the "most grotesque piece of racist trash ever written" or novelist Jane Smiley claiming that it's just not terribly good novel-writing (somehow a more shocking apostasy). Or pulling back from those tight shots of the Twain house and asking what the hell happened to his much-exalted city of Hartford.

Twain's fun was often Tenenbaum's fun. My favorite story is of a visit to the Hartford house by a group of Boston Brahmin literati. After a night's sleep, Twain rapped on the door of one couple, the Aldriches, and sharply reprimanded them for disturbing the house with their amorous noises. Only later did the horrified, dignified people learn than he was merely amusing himself or somebody else at their expense.

If you live in Hartford, you sooner or later have to delve into Twain, and you find an amiable guy who is only slightly less enraged than the Eye of Sauron, a guy whose enlightenment is constantly at war with his deep-rooted bigotry, a guy whose courageous honesty is at war with his crass chicanery. He's a mess! Just like us, only more so.

The real Twain makes you squirm. On PBS, he's a little denatured. Burns found some of his dark places, especially on the second night, but he's always a little protective of his icons. If you watched Burns' "Jazz," you would never know that Wynton Marsalis, who emerges from the work with a Giotto halo, has spent much of his adult life fending off (mostly unfair) charges that he's a leading practitioner of white-guys-can't-blow reverse racism.

In Connecticut, the documentary was pre-empted for one of its nights by the UConn women's basketball team. The Huskies have the same problem Burns has. They don't make you squirm. They just win by 50. They make you feel as good as you ever can without actually putting something at risk. Which is not very good. Twain felt much better than that on his good night, because he wasn't averse to feeling just plain awful.